Whatever happened to the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

Whatever happened to the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370?

The global community, especially CNN, was mesmerized for weeks in March and April over the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370.

As we all remember, the flight vanished shortly after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia on its way to Beijing. Despite non-stop worldwide media coverage, social media speculation and the passengers’ families heartbreaking distress — there has not been one single shred of physical evidence to suggest the location or story of what happened the plane.

While the media frenzy has died down significantly and CNN’s Don Lemon has moved on to much more important matters… the plane is still missing and the families still have no more substantive answers to their questions than on March 8 when MH370 vanished.

Over the last few days there does seem to be a renewed effort by the Chinese, Malaysian and Australian governments to double down on a search of the South Indian Ocean. Last weekend, the Malaysian authorities announced a renewed search effort.

Malaysia will deploy more equipment in the southern Indian Ocean to help the Australian-led search efforts to locate flight MH370, which went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board. The missing plane has triggered an unprecedented international search over the past four months.

Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said Sunday that an Asset Deployment Committee has already finalized a list of equipment to be sent to the current search zone off the west coast of Australia, where the debris of the missing jet is expected to be located, local media reported.

“Instructions for immediate mobilization have been given and the assets are expected to reach the search area in mid-August 2014. Operational requirements for these assets will be coordinated with the Australian authorities,” Hussein was quoted by the Malay Mail Online as saying. “It must be stressed that Malaysia, together with Australia and China are doing our utmost in the search and our top priority remains to look for the missing MH370 and giving closure to the families of those on board MH370.”

In the meantime, Malaysian passengers’ family members have tried to raise money to conduct their own private investigation of the missing plane. Unfortunately, with the heavy media attention subsiding, their fundraising efforts haven’t gone as well as planned.

In the weeks since it was launched on the popular crowd-funding site Indiegogo, the campaign, named The Reward MH370: The Search for the Truth, has raised just $92,000 from 935 funders — well short of its original multimillion dollar target, the report added.

In the campaign’s update section, organiser Ethan Hunt wrote: “Today we have extended our campaign for another 30 days. We have done this to ensure we have every opportunity to raise the funds required to meet our objectives.”

Originally scheduled to end this month, the campaign will now be extended until August 8.

The clues to what happened to the plane and specifically if there were criminal elements to the disappearance seem as murky as the search itself. At the end of June, major news outlets reported that all of the passengers on the flight had been cleared of suspicion by intelligence and law enforcement — except the pilot.

The captain of MH370 is now ‘chief suspect’ in Malaysia’s official police investigation into the ongoing mystery of the Malaysia Airlines jet’s disappearance – after investigators found suspicious evidence from a flight simulator in his home.

Captain Zaharie Shah, 53, reportedly used his home simulator to practice take-off and landings in remote locations, including some airstrips in the southern Indian Ocean.
Investigators have now managed to obtain the files – which had been deleted before they swept the machine.

After more than 170 interviews, detectives determined that Captain Shah was the most likely culprit if the plane – which went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board – was lost due to human intervention, according to The Sunday Times.

The criminal inquiry completed intelligence checks on all of the people on board the flight to Beijing via Kuala Lumpur, but the only individual arousing suspicion was Captain Zaharie.

However, just within the past day, Captain Shah’s sister has publicly discussed the missing plane and her brother for the first time. She strongly denies that he had anything to do with the plane’s disappearance.

The sister of the pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 has broken her silence to defend her brother’s name.

In the first-ever television interview granted by his siblings, Sakinab Ahmad Shah appears on “The Mystery of MH370″, a Channel NewsAsia special that examines the events of March 8.

Captain Zaharie is seen by some as the man with the best opportunity and capability if the plane’s disappearance was caused by deliberate human action.

But Ms Sakinab rejects the notion that her brother was responsible.

Ms Sakinab said: “We couldn’t figure out why somebody who would want to commit suicide would prolong the agony of flying for four, five, six hours just to land down there.

“If it was done, if he was the one who planned it, he has to be some kind of Einstein, which he was not.”

All of this has prompted countless conspiracy theories — fueled by the complete lack of physical evidence or new electronic data.

So four months after one of the world’s strangest aviation mystery — the whereabouts of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 are unknown and according to one expert, it may take decades to find the answers.

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